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Serious Sam Collection Review
I’ve been a fan of Croteam’s Serious Sam franchise since its first launch back in 2001. Its combination of energetic shooting action, hordes of enemies, vibrant visual design, and relentless pacing puts it near the top of the first person shooter genre in my mind. Serious Sam may not have the polish of true gaming legends like the Doom series, but it has the same heart and blissful fun at its core. Over the last few months, I had the joy of playing through the entire franchise with a friend through its online co-op mode on PC, and it’s still as thrilling today as it has ever been.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to classify Serious Sam Collection’s new console release as anything other than a disappointment. It was released a couple of weeks ago for Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch for $29.99 after spending the last several months as a Stadia exclusive. The basis for the collection is an essentially-abandoned Steam project called Serious Sam Fusion, itself a collection of games that were first released on PC and Xbox 360 almost a decade ago.
Collection bundles together Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD, The Second Encounter HD, and Serious Sam 3, alongside a few small DLC packages. I’ve tested the game extensively on both the Xbox Series S and Stadia. Its biggest issue on consoles is performance. The game has two visual settings: a Graphics mode that’s locked at 30FPS and a Performance mode that dials everything back and goes for 60FPS.
While this setup is theoretically understandable for the Nintendo Switch, it’s completely absurd to see these settings on Sony and Microsoft’s platforms. It’s baffling that everything from the base Xbox One on up to the new Series consoles and PS5 can’t run these games at 60 frames per second with all the graphics options turned on. These are re-releases of games that ran competently on the Xbox 360. Games that have paltry system requirements on PC and will run fast on the proverbial toaster/potato/metaphor-of-your-choosing. Games that have twenty year old technology buried underneath them.
